Blame and Innocence

A nine year old boy died. This is not normal. He contracted meningitis, not a common problem in Addis, but the children's compromised immune systems make them susceptible to a lot of uncommon diseases. His death was surely preventable. In most places if a person is diagnosed with meningitis it is routinely treated by a hospital. Just a couple of days before, he was as alive, and lively as any of the other kids. He was at school when it became clear that he was severely ill. The school called, and we went to pick him up, and he was at the hospital within an hour. He died two days later.

It is hard to say who is to blame for his death. Some say nobody is to blame, and terrible things happen. But I think there is a lot of blame to go around. It is easy to blame the hospital and the doctors, because better care might have helped him. Or, maybe if we had watched him closer at AHOPE we would have caught it sooner. But there are bigger issues as well, there seems to be a fatalistic aspect of the culture that is foreign to the Western idea of there always being something more one can do. Do we blame the underlying reasons of the systemic poverty that makes the living conditions in Ethiopia what they are. One thing is certain, there is plenty of blame to go around.

Fortunately this is not a common occurrence at AHOPE. Since the advent (belatedly in 2004) of anti-retroviral drugs their have been very few funerals. The future is wide open for these children, both good and bad.